The Advertising Action on Climate Project has been set up in order to remove the number one blockage to the urgent actions required in the UK to tackle our climate crisis, i.e. the climate sceptic opposition of the four main right-wing UK media corporations, and their five billionaire owners. These are Rupert Murdoch (Times/The Sun), Jonathan Harmsworth (Daily Mail Group), Richard Desmond (Express
/Star) and the Barclay Brothers (Telegraph). The global Climate Sceptic De-Advertisement Campaign starts here! An international study by the Reuters Institute in 2011 found that climate scepticism was especially prevalent in the right-wing US and UK media. Since then matters have got worse, as exemplified by a recent (2016) letter to The Times by distinguished leaders of the UK’s scientific community, condemning the unscientific nature of its climate coverage. This has led to public opinion in both UK and US to be among the most climate sceptic populations in an Ipsos 2014 international survey. This has allowed the current Tory government to destroy a whole host of climate crisis government programmes, hard fought for by the climate movement over the last two decades, without almost a whimper of opposition from the public. Tackling these five climate sceptic billionaires is by far the single most urgent issue facing the climate action community in Britain. With the planetary alarm bells ringing at Alarm Level 10, (almost every single month over the last 2 years has broken global temperature records – the planet is on fire!!), the time for action has to be now, as indeed we may already be too late to avert an ecological apocalypse. In the absence of the ability to carry out an effective consumer boycott in time and their immunity from shareholder and investor pressures, due to the media billionaires’ controlling shareholdings in the four media corporations that they own, the potentially truly effective remaining lever that can be used constructively is the power of their corporate advertisers and the consumers who buy products and services from those corporations. AACP says it is now crucial that those in the business community who already understand the seriousness of the threat that carbon emissions are posing to our economy and ecological systems, and whose massive advertising budgets are the major source of revenue for these climate sceptic media corporations, must now actively engage in an urgent constructive dialogue with these media organisations’ editors and owners on the issue. The purpose of such a dialogue would be to seek assurances that, as a beginning, all climate crisis coverage would in future be science-based and that an end would be put to the flood of uncontested comment and editorial articles from non-scientific climate-sceptic lobbyists. These five climate-sceptic UK billionaire media corporation owners (and their editors) must be made to realise that wide swathes of the business community need these media corporations to be energetic advocates of effective and economically literate solutions to the climate crisis, which the recent Global Summit in Paris agreed that we were in the throes of. If any of these five extremist climate-sceptic media billionaires, refuse to stop promoting non-science based climate-sceptic propaganda, then it is essential that climate-responsible corporations cease supporting them via their advertising revenues. The bottom line is a corporation cannot claim to be climate-responsible if it is funding the destructive climate-sceptic media billionaires. AACP is calling on all climate responsible corporations to therefore urgently join the De-advertisement Movement from those press and media corporations who refuse to stop promoting non-science based climate-scepticism and are failing to show leadership in this climate emergency. AACP is excited at the potential for this De-advertisement campaign to remove this blockage to urgent climate action. We believe that with the support rather than the current outright opposition by these five extremist media billionaires, all of the current corrupt opposition by the catastrophic fossil fuel industry and their political lobbyists, within government and within all our major political parties, would collapse. Britain could then go full speed ahead to creating the excitingly positive net zero-carbon economy, that we desperately need to create asap. Yes We Can! peace
Donnachadh McCarthy FRSA
Founder – Advertising Action on Climate Project
